Bad Sex With Shalom Auslander

Trouble in pornoland.

September 10, 2007

Early signs for sex that evening were positive: it was not yet 8 o'clock, the baby was asleep, and neither my wife nor I had been overly exhausted by another difficult day on this too-trying Earth, nor overly depressed, nor overly angry, nor overly murderous, nor overly suicidal. As my wife showered, I sat with my laptop on our bed, responding to some late emails and sipping a glass of wine. It is a fact that the probability of any evening's marital sexual relations is directly proportional to the length of either partner's shower that said evening, and she had been in there for some time now. When she finally emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel and chased by a gentle billow of steam, I was pleased to see her head straight for her lingerie drawer.

"Hey," I said, "you're not the regular poolboy."

"Just thought I'd come by, Ma'am," she said, "see if anything was too wet."

I laughed, and then she laughed, and as she turned and headed back into the bathroom, she asked if we had any decent porno we could watch.

"No," I said, "but we have broadband."

"Even better," she said, closing the door behind her.

It's important for you to know at this point that me and porno go way back. Me and porno are buddies. Me and porno, we hang.

When I was a nine-year-old Orthodox yeshiva student, I found a pile of discarded pornography magazines in the woods behind my house. Compared to the physical world around me — a world of overwhelming religious restriction and suffocating social regulations — the fantasy world of pornography seemed like a parallel, if gooey, version of the Garden of Eden my rabbis had just described to me. Legs were eternally spread, bodies were proudly exposed, heads were thrown back in ecstasy. In porno there was no guilt, no shame, no fear, no anger. Black people fucked white people, white people fucked black people, men fucked women, women fucked women, and, in a magazine named Blueboy, buried at the very bottom of the pile, men even fucked men. People in Pornoland ate pussy, they ate ass, they ate come. Was come kosher, I wondered? Was there a blessing on pussy? The people of Pornoland didn't seem to care, and I loved them for it. With inspiring abandon, women lavished attention and in turn were lavished upon, and men spilled their seed on the floor and the chair and the couch and the bellies and the backs and the faces and the lips without fear of retribution, without worry about damnation and without concern for the purgatorial post-death punishment one rabbi had described to us that year of being boiled alive for Eternity in a vat of all the semen you wasted during your lifetime. Licking, sucking, pinching, fucking: do what you want, the leaders of Pornoland declared, but judge not, scorn not, worry not. Paradise.

Perhaps this had been Walt Disney's idea when he created Disneyland — a place, first and foremost, free of anger. But Mickey didn't have a cock, and Minnie didn't have a pussy, and so I wasn't all that impressed with their idyllic existence. John Holmes, though. Ginger Lynn. Wendy Whoppers. Now there was a group I could emulate. I admired their daring, their rebellion, their freedom. They made me feel better about myself, as rabbis both dead and alive did everything they could to make me feel the opposite. So I was surprised when, a few years later, I saw people (non-religious people!) in Manhattan (Manhattan!) protesting pornography. Pornography! I had recently begun yeshiva high school on 181st Street, and had cut Talmud class to go to Times Square. It wasn't long before my backpack was filled with hardcore magazines and videocassettes, and I headed over to the bus stop on Forty-Seventh and Fifth, whereupon I passed an angry woman shouting into a megaphone and waving a wooden placard above her head. On the placard was a large still-frame from a hardcore porno movie: a large-breasted blonde woman on her knees, eyes closed, getting done from behind by an ecstatic black man. I was about to ask her where I could find such a movie when I noticed her friend carrying another placard which read "Porn = Hate!"

Really? I wondered. I thought it =ed liberty. I thought it =ed escape. I thought it =ed fun.

Lunatic, I thought to myself.

And where the hell did she get that movie?

The door to the bathroom opened again, and my wife climbed into bed beside me. We sat side by side, the laptop between us, and underneath the "Bookmarks" heading in the web browser, I selected an online porno forum I used to frequent. It had been a while since I'd been to that site, though — the combination of a pregnancy, a newborn baby and the stress of raising an infant hadn't ruined our sex life as completely as some had predicted, but it had made pornography somewhat inconvenient — when you have barely the time or the energy for the main feature, so to speak, who can be bothered with the previews? I clicked on the first forum entry, and screen caps of the downloadable video began to appear.

"Jesus Christ," said my wife once the page had loaded.

Now listen: I have had bad days before. I have been fired from jobs, I have been dumped by girlfriends, I have totaled cars. I have had days where I have received three — count 'em, three — tickets for speeding or moving violations between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. But I have never had a day as bad as a woman named "Cloey" had the day they shot the video that appeared on that page — that is to say, I have never had a day where someone wrote the word "Cockwhore" on my forehead with lipstick, tried to shove their entire fist down my throat and then "choke-fucked" me with their penis until I barfed on their testicles. Never, ever had a day like that. Nor have I ever had a day like the blonde woman in the movie that was pictured below it: I never had a day where someone hung a toilet seat around my neck, spit in my mouth and slapped my face as he tried to shove the head of his cock through the back of my skull.

Bad days I have had. But not that bad.

"Jesus. Fucking. Christ," said my wife.

We sat like that, side by side, proclaiming disbelief as I scrolled further down the page, the subject headings for the forum entries sounding like the police blotter from a place Snake Plisskin might have escaped:

GIRL SLAPPED!

CHICK STUFFING BASBEALL BATS INTO HER CUNT!

HARD ANAL, THROATFUCKING AND PUKING (A LOT!)

PERFECT SLUT EXTREMELY HARD TREATED — MUST SEE!

This was the description of that last one the poster had included with his screen caps:

"This scene has everything: blowjob, gagging, ass-to-mouth, rimming, assfuck, streched holes — there is nothing left!"

"Nice work, man!" another poster responded to the original poster.

"Thanks a lot for all these fine videos," responds another.

"Very, very good post," responds a third. "Thanks a lot for sharing."

Such politeness, given the nature of the video, is only funny if it isn't your stretched holes they happen to be discussing.

This was not some "extreme sex" forum. That forum existed at the bottom of the page — "Paid Members ONLY" — though I can't imagine what sort of headings might be found there.

No, this was the regular forum. This was the mainstream. This was porn, 2007.

I know I'm supposed to be okay with this. I know I shouldn't judge. I know that I'm showing my age or my prudishness or my conservatism or my narrow-mindedness. But I'm thinking about those porn protesters back on the corner of Forty-Sixth and Sixth, sometime in 1985, and I'm beginning to wonder if porno in 2007 isn't proving them right; it's difficult to present a credible defense against charges of hatred and misogyny when the star witness has the word "cunt" written on her forehead and a guy named Max Hardcore is urinating in her mouth. A moment with my client, Your Honor.

My wife sat back and pulled the covers over her legs.

"Do guys really want that?" she asked.

"Looks that way," I said.

It didn't look that way because of one forum. It looked that way because the Gag Factor series of films, in which women are turned upside down and choke-fucked until their faces are covered with drool, semen and barf (Adult Video News Award Winner, "Best Oral Series"), is now up to sequel #22. Because the Slap Happy series, in which a male performer only pauses from asphyxiating the starlet with his penis to slap her repeatedly across the face and verbally abuse her, is up to sequel #13.

What happened to my wonderful porno?

What happened to that oasis of playful, heathenish fornication?

What happened to my cheesy pool boy?

I'm afraid he's "punch-fucking" some girl's ass while calling her a dirty whore cunt slut. And I think I'm right.

My wife pulled on her robe, and I blew out the candle she had lit on the nightstand.

Ginger Lynn had made feel free.

The Devil in Miss Jones made me feel better about my own devils.

But Meatholes ("Nasty whores who love to be treated like worthless pieces of meat!") makes me feel exactly the way my rabbis wanted me to feel, makes me feel just as self-loathing and disgusted with sex as a community full of ultra-Orthodox lunatics were convinced I should be. So who's the worthless piece of meat now?

My wife went into the kitchen, made some tea and grabbed some biscuits while I went to YouTube and found an episode of South Park.

We watched and laughed and sipped our tea and soon my wife asked, "Do you think these kids will want to do that to women when they get older?"

"I think Stan will be gay," I said. "And I think Cartman already wants to."

We finished our biscuits, shut down the computer and went to sleep. I wonder how I'm going to explain all this to my son. I wonder what happened to the people in Pornoland. And I wonder how many of you only read this far in the hopes of finding out the name of that website.
©2007 Shalom Auslander and hooksexup.com